Chapter 43| Allegiance

Chapter 43: Chapter 43| Allegiance

The door opened at the forty three minute mark.

Damian had been counting without meaning to — the specific habit of someone whose internal clock had been calibrated by six years of facility schedules and hadn’t entirely unlearned itself. He and Sable were on the bathroom towels they’d spread on the main room floor, backs against the wall beside the bathroom door, their damp hair and the steam still drifting from the bathroom behind them telling the story of the last forty three minutes more clearly than either of them would have chosen.

Kira unlocked the door, stepped inside and stopped.

She looked at them. At the towels. At the steam. At the specific quality of two people sitting on a floor with the particular ease of people who had recently stopped being tense about something.

"I see you both are making yourselves comfortable," she said.

Sable looked up from the tablet she’d already retrieved and opened. "I’d agree," she said, "if there was anything comfortable about hiding in a safe house with an extraction team activating in seventy two hours."

Kira looked at her for a moment. "Fair point." She set her jacket on the chair and moved toward the kitchen. "Make sense."

She filled a glass of water and drank half of it and then stopped.

Stood very still.

Her head tilted slightly — the specific tilt of someone whose senses had registered something their brain was still catching up to. She turned slowly and looked at the room with narrowed eyes and then she inhaled once, deliberately, through her nose.

"Wait."

Silence.

"I can smell..." She stopped. Her expression moved through several things in rapid succession — processing, conclusion, the specific look of someone who had arrived at an answer they hadn’t been expecting to find. "Is that..." She looked between them. "Did you two just have sex?"

The silence that followed had a particular quality.

Damian was already moving — reaching for his bag, pulling it toward him, going through the contents with the focused attention of someone who had just remembered something important. Sable had closed her tablet and was doing the same on her side, one hand disappearing into the bag she’d set against the wall.

"Sable ," Damian said, without looking up.

Sable looked at him. "What?"

"My hoodie." He turned to look at her properly. "The grey one. I had it when we left Eren’s. Do you remember where I put it?"

"Have you checked your box?" she replied. "The smaller case. Left side pocket."

He reached for the case.

Kira stared at them.

"You’re both being very calm," she said. "Suspiciously calm. Almost as if you’re deliberately not answering a very direct question that I asked approximately thirty seconds ago." She looked between them. "So you actually did it." A pause. "I thought you were just in a.... I don’t know, a symbiotic research arrangement. A professional.." She stopped. "Maybe something I don’t know how to classify..."

"We’re partners," Damian cut it, finding the hoodie and pulling it out.

"Oh." Kira blinked. "Oh wow." She leaned against the kitchen doorframe with the expression of someone recalibrating a picture they’d had assembled incorrectly. "So you were actually... in this situation. With everything going on..." She exhaled. "Okay. Alright. That’s.. okay."

Sable looked up from her bag. "It’s a functional necessity," she said, in the tone she used when she was being precise and also slightly defensive about being precise. "The stress of the past seventy two hours produces cortisol accumulation that impairs cognitive function. Physical intimacy releases oxytocin which counteracts that impairment." She paused. "I figured Damian needed it. The cognitive clearing." She glanced at him. "How do you feel?"

He pulled the hoodie over his head and considered the question honestly.

"A lot better," he said. "I didn’t know that kind of... clearing mechanism existed."

"The body knows things the mind doesn’t always acknowledge," Sable said simply.

Kira looked between them with an expression that was losing its battle with something that might have been amusing if the situation hadn’t also been genuinely absurd. "The actual..." She pressed two fingers to her temple. "Right. Okay. Just... please. I’m asking very nicely. When I’m in the room, or within earshot, or within..." She gestured vaguely at the small unit around them. "This entire space... can we not have sex. The place is barely four hundred square feet."

Her face had gone pink in a way that her field operative composure was working hard to manage and not entirely managing.

Damian looked at her.

It was the first time since the farmhouse yard that he’d looked at her without the operational filter fully in place. Without running the threat assessment, the distance calculation, the element class analysis. Just looked at her the way he looked at things when he wasn’t being careful about it.

She was tall. Lean in the specific way of someone whose body had been built by two years of field work rather than a gym — functional, nothing decorative about it, the kind of build that moved well because it had needed to move well rather than because someone had decided it should look a certain way. Small waist. The silver streak in her short hair catching the unit’s light. A face that had been sharp and closed every time he’d seen it until approximately forty seconds ago when the pink in her cheeks had opened it into something considerably less guarded. She also had a portable butt and chest from what his eyes could see.

"You look cute," he said. "For your size."

The pink deepened immediately into something closer to red.

She opened her mouth. Then closed it. A muscle in her jaw worked briefly.

"I..." She stopped. Started again. "It is extremely rare," she said, with the controlled precision of someone choosing each word with care, "for anyone to say that to me. To my face. And mean it as a compliment."

"I meant it as a compliment," he said.

She looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn’t fully read — something that had several things in it at once, none of them the professional flatness she’d walked in with.

Then she straightened up from the doorframe and pulled her composure back around herself the way someone pulled on a jacket.

"Let’s talk business," she said. "We have seventy two hours and a Facility Four operational file that isn’t going to discuss itself." Changing the topic instantly.

"Cool down once in a while," Sable said from the floor, not looking up from her tablet. "It’s good for the cortisol."

Kira looked at her.

"Thank you, researcher," she said flatly. "I’ll keep that in mind."

She pulled her chair out from the table and sat down and opened her own tablet and the unit settled into the specific atmosphere of three people who had just found their footing in something that didn’t have a clean category yet — not quite a team, not quite strangers, something in the space between that was still deciding what it wanted to be.

Damian sat down across from Kira.

She met his eyes briefly and looked at her screen and the pink in her cheeks had not entirely gone and he noted that and filed it in the place he filed things that didn’t have an immediate operational use but that he wasn’t ready to stop paying attention to.

Sable settled into the third chair and opened the Facility Four file and the table received all three of them and outside the city continued in its complete indifference and the seventy two hour clock ran in the background of everything like it always had.

"Right," Kira said. "Facility Four."